Guild Wars 2

I feel as if there is a very large gap between, what the game developers consider fun, and what their customers consider fun, I would like to try to point out some of the things that I consider fun in the game while offering suggestions for what I would consider improvements, in hopes it can help further the development of the game in a constructive manner.

I will start with playing with your friends. Playing with your friends in game is one of the most rewarding experiences and is one of the main reasons people will stay around a game for a long period of time. You enjoy these people and you enjoy experiencing the game world with these people, and the elephant in the room is that, I feel that there are many things that are being done in the game right now that make this experience much harder than it needs to be. These things include:

Mob Scaling — I feel that mobs in the open world should only scale up for events where there are just a ton of people doing them aka the zerg, I know this was a huge selling point for you guys on the initial release of the game, but the thing of it is, a year and a half later, I no longer find this feature appealing, it was a neat idea at first, but it’s not fun when a challenge continually gets in the way of your having fun, and secondly when the challenge is already something you’ve encountered, and it’s harder the second time around. When you face a problem in life and figure it out, chances are the next time around it will be easier, not harder, I would like to see mob scaling operating a bit more logically.

Dungeon Scaling — I think that this and mob scaling are backwards and maybe you guys mixed them up?? Dungeons don’t scale and I feel that they should. I feel the game would be more fun if the dungeons scaled to the level of the players in the party either by an average level or by somehow compensating for someone who is level 40 in Ascalonian Catacombs while the other 4 party members are level 80. I do not feel that this is balanced and it feels not so fun because of that

Collecting — I love collecting things both in real life and in my virtual lives and it feels like every corner that I turn you are waiting to make it more difficult for me to collect items that make my game experience better. If you are going to add more collections in the game please make them somewhat obtainable. My biggest frustration in this is minipets. I should firstly preface with: If I see something on the gem store that I am on the fence about I will buy it regardless of the fact because I know that you guys put a lot of effort into these items and want to reward you for the quality work, however the implementation of these items is not good quality in my opinion. With that being said, I strongly dislike the fact that I can not buy previous years minipets for holiday events when the minipets are account bound to begin with, I feel like someone was just having a bad day and wanted to make some people upset because the logic behind this is escaping me. It is account bound, if I want to buy 10 of them, why can’t I? I would essentially be paying you money and you are refusing, there aren’t many scenarios in life where I’ve seen this happen.

Node Mining — This feature of the game is quite fun. I love going out and farming nodes to either get some materials for my account or to make a little extra gold in game. Scavenging these in the open-world is a really cool thing and I don’t think people realize how fun this can truly be, on my first day in the game I wanted to farm all of the nodes that I saw, this is still a great feature a year and some months later.

Storyline Paths — I have played through the storyline and I felt very disappointed with the turn of events. You play through the game and no matter what you are doing, you are constantly being given a choice: This or that, apples or banana’s, candy corn or veggie pizza. It was very frustrating for me to finish the game the first time and realize that it didn’t matter if I fed the tengu warrior blocking the road a veggie pizza or an omnomberry pie, because the result was fixed and would turn out the same no matter what. This made me feel as if the choices I made, had no impact on the game, which in turn made me feel that the storyline didn’t matter because I was not a part of it any longer.

Guilds — I think guilds are very fun at the moment and they have come a long way since release. I also feel like there are many improvements that can be made and they have been voiced and heard and I’m hoping that those improvements at the very least, will be considered.

Dungeon Variety — The paths to dungeons are nice, but they still feel like they are fixed in place, if you choose path 2 of Citadel of Flame you will fight the same boss every time you choose path 2. Fractals has this feature already, I think it would be an awesome addition to regular dungeons. Choosing path 2 for CoF and realizing you could fight 1 of 4 bosses not only would require parties to be more versatile, but it would spice things up significantly, things wouldn’t be so, generic.

Teamplay/Profession Imbalance — This also can apply to dungeons. I don’t want anyone to believe I am saying the 5 man team is a bad thing, I think it is perfectly fine for this game, but there are some improvements on it that I would like to suggest. Currently it feels like the game is going down this path of change that is in the end for the better, but we are in the roughest part at the moment, when pertaining to overall game balance. Many if not all of the professions in the game are supposed to be able to fill any role. This is an issue at the moment because we have gotten away from that. Warriors do damage better than everyone else, if you want a zerker team you take 5 warriors, you don’t consider taking a necromancer or an engineer. If you want a team that has high survivability, you take 5 guardians in your team because they are most able to survive especially in a team effort, once again, you wouldn’t consider a necromancer or a ranger because they aren’t the best choice to take. Why settle for less than the best? I think the game has several options, but two stick out like a sore thumb: A.) The game can be balanced by means of each profession having benefits that others do not. B.) Falling into the holy trinity syndrome and finding a way to make it work with 8 professions, which seems like the direction we are currently headed and hope very desperately that we can reconsider this even being a viable option. What happened to the uniqueness? Why can’t thieves for example, work more effectively in a group, like if you have 3 or more thieves in party you get some inherent bonus to the parties condition damage or some sort of a stealth mechanism that allows for you to be in combat for a short period of time while remaining in stealth? There are many avenues that could be taken, and I feel that those are all being ignored for the generic route.

Home Instance — I don’t feel welcome or at home in my home instance. It’s just another place to me, it’s not personal or inviting. I cannot invite people to my home instance and throw some sort of party with friends. I don’t understand it’s purpose currently, other than to keep us on bait and hook until the next living story update where their may or may not be something that sounds useful for the home instance, this is very frustrating. This place is supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be where you can always go to have fun and there isn’t anything to do there and it continually gets discredited and overlooked. Have you forgotten about it? Do you still realize it’s there?

Guild Halls — I would feel more welcome in the game if I could go to a place to hang out with my guild where it’s just us, we could sit and crack jokes, enjoy the scenery and throw little guild get-togethers in the guild hall. I think an answer on whether or not this feature is going to happen would be appreciated by many.

Support — This one is exclusive to these forums. I know you guys are very busy trying to get as much done as you can for these big patches, updates, and an expansion in the future. How difficult would it be for one person to keep us updated on what is going on with a few things? Dedicate one person to us if you need to, we like being informed. I will give you a very fair example: I work with customers every day, and all that any of them really care about is that you keep them informed, that’s all we are wanting here. If I happen to take a day longer to work on their equipment than I had originally said, as long as I let the customer know that this is happening and keep them up to date it is NEVER a problem. A lot of bitterness on these forums could be resolved if you could just let us know what’s going on and keep us informed.